Thursday, April 17, 2014

Time Spent on Games

I thought it might be interesting to take a look at how much time I've spent on various games. Steam is awesome for this in that it tracks the total playtime for every game in my library! I could probably even go back through my email history to find out how much I paid for each game to look at the dollars per hour situation for each game. I took a look at that sort of thing back in 2010 when I mused about how paying to play an MMORPG was actually a pretty fine deal.

Going just from my games on Steam my all-time leader is Path of Exile which is coming in with 775 hours played. Considering it is entirely free to play and that it's only really been out for ~5 months that's a pretty big number. I did give them $20 at one point, I think, to unlock some extra stash tabs, but even still that puts it at ~39 hours per dollar which puts it at one of the best values of any game I've ever played. Even if you discount the hours some because I've left it running way more than any of the other games on Steam it's got to be pretty good.

Next up is Blood Bowl, with 439 hours on record. A lot of those hours weren't actually me playing games, though. I spent a lot of that time watching other people play games in our leagues. That was good times! I'm getting my Blood Bowl fix out of FumBBL now, and I've played 225 games there at probably an hour per game so it's got a good chunk of time too. FumBBL has been completely free, and I'm pretty sure I paid like $70 or $80 for the various Cyanide Blood Bowl games. So FumBBL would be awesome, and Cyanide would be only ok.

Civ V is next with 225 hours played. I'm a little surprised this number is so low, since I really like Civ V and I thought I'd played it a lot. It's got a real game price tag on it, and I've bought both expansions, so it's value is only around 2 hours per dollar. Still a better entertainment value than practically anything else, but not top tier as far as games go.

SolForge surprises me as the next one on the list, with 163 hours played. I guess I do like the idea of the card game and really like drafting, and it took quite a while for it to really push me over the edge and give up on it. I paid $10 so I could start drafting, so it's actually over 16 hours per dollar which puts it really high up on the list. Maybe it would be a fine idea to buy some more tickets in order to draft more consistently? It might not be a great use of that money, but it would average out to still a really good value? Something to think about.

The next game is the game I was actually curious about. FTL, with only 73 hours played. I really like FTL, and I think I only payed $7 for it, so it's in the same tier as Civ V. And it's a game I'm still actively playing (I've been taking some turns during downtime of the LCS).

Below that is sadly a bunch of games that just haven't been played very much at all. Dungeon Defenders (37 hours), Rogue Legacy (34 hours), Magic 2014 (25 hours), Guns of Icarus (20 hours), Defender's Quest (19 hours), Alan Wake (14 hours), Antichamber (14 hours), DmC (12 hours), Awesomenauts (11 hours), and Forced (11 hours) round out the games above 10 hours played. A lot of these games were really good, but I guess just didn't have the replayability of something like Path of Exile?

And then there's Final Fantasy X HD, which is currently sitting at around 65 hours on my save file. I've died a bunch of times though, so actual time played is probably more like 70 hours at this point. And I'm nowhere near done! And when I am done there's still going to be Final Fantasy X-2 that came on the same disk. I ended up paying $114 after all the stupid import fees and handling charges and taxes and junk so it's probably not going to get much better than 2 hours per dollar. But even at that cost it's still as good as Civ V and FTL and way better than any other entertainment option, and that's ignoring the value gained from the awesome soundtrack that came with FFX.

So I guess even though I'm still bitter at those extra fees in reality they're still not dragging the value for the game down below other excellent games I've been really happy to buy. So I guess it really wasn't much of a disaster after all, huh?

3 comments:

Also, I believe a site exists which combs your steam data and has some of the price data to give you a hours/ dollar number (doesn't know what games you got on sale/via humble, so some numbers may be inflated).